Anne Rees-Mogg

Anne Rees-Mogg was an experimental film director and teacher. She served as the chair of the London Film-makers' Co-operative between 1981 and 1984. She was the older sister of the newspaper editor William Rees-Mogg and the aunt of the British politician Jacob Rees-Mogg.

Biography Anne Rees-Mogg was bought up at Cholwell House near Temple Cloud in Somerset. She served in the Women's Land Army in the Second World War. Rees-Mogg was part of the painting department at Chelsea as film was not yet considered part of the fine arts by the college. She was also a supporter of Women's equality and rights for LGBT people. He appeared in several of her films as a child alongside his siblings. Thew recalled that when she disappointed Rees-Mogg with the cut of one of her films, Rees-Mogg "raged" and "...kicked the edit room door with her plastic lamé-spangled sandals".

Themes Thew, in her entry on Rees-Mogg in the 1995 book A Directory of British Film and Video Artists, described the "key" to Rees-Mogg's films as the "collecting phenomena" and that her films concerned "time, memory, personal relationships and the discovery of film-making". Thew likened Rees-Mogg's densely decorated house to the curated boxes of the American conceptual artist Joseph Cornell, crowded with "ivory letters, the inflatable Coca-Cola bottle, the vast collection of enamel signs and mementoes, academy leaders and old Kodak Spools, the round mirror-topped table heaped with cut glass decanter tops".

Melissa Gronlund, in a 2019 profile of Rees-Mogg for The Guardian, felt that her concerns echoed those of much later filmmakers with her focus on "personal memory [chiming] with later feminist work that took seriously everyday concerns". Rees-Mogg's "technique of collaging together memories with pop songs and her own lightly self-mocking commentary, feels contemporary".

Work Rees-Mogg's films focus on the domestic locales of her lfe, including her flat in south London, and her ancestral home Cholwell House in Somerset. Her house in north London was demolished, Rees-Mogg captured its destruction on film.

Her films frequently feature her family members and her students from the Chelsea School of Art.

Her 1980 film Transmogrification features Alexei Sayle, her student at Chelsea, as well as her nieces Emma and Charlotte Rees-Mogg who appear in Georgian dress in front of the Rees-Mogg family's ancestral home.

Jacob Rees-Mogg is shown catching butterflies in a field in her 1980 film Living Memory.

The film Grandfather's Footsteps from 1983 begins with a box of photographic negatives that Rees-Mogg found in a glass cigar box and tells the story of her grandfather, a clergyman. In the film she states that "I don't think that anyone should ever do what they are told...If you look back at obedience to fashion in writing, in painting, in film-making, it just doesn’t work. It's just always academic to do what other people think is correct". Jacob and his brother Thomas Rees-Mogg are shown playing the game Mother May I? in Grandfather's Footsteps.

Filmography Nothing is Something (1966) One (1968–1969) A Length of Time (1970) Real Time (1971–1974) Muybridge Film (1975) Sentimental Journey (1977) Transmogrification (1980) Living Memory (1980) Macbeth a Tragedy (1983) Welcome/Adieu (1983) Grandfather's Footsteps (1983)